When

Friday November 15, 2013 from 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM EST
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Where

Rosenthal Pavilion, Kimmel Center, 10th Floor 
60 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012  


Directions 

Contact

Laura Freschi 
NYU Development Research Institute 
 
dri@nyu.edu 
 

Beyond the Nation: Pioneering Studies in How Development Spreads 

You are invited to join DRI at our 2013 Annual Conference.  Registration is now open for this all-day event.

The development debate today overemphasizes the nation-state as a unit of analysis. This is understandable since most statistics are available only at the country level. Yet development success often happens at scales either larger or smaller than the nation-state, whether it be the remarkable dynamism of one city block, one ethnic group, or one network of technological innovators, or the long-term evolution of products, technology, and institutions, when individuals move, associate, innovate, disseminate, and trade.

The studies in this conference are the first from a DRI research project studying non-national examples of economic development.

Breakfast and lunch will be served.

Conference Agenda:

9:00am-9:30am: Coffee and Refreshments

9:30am-10:30am: William Easterly, Professor of Economics, NYU, "Why are we So Obsessed with Nations in Economic Development?"

10:30am-11:30am: Ross Levine, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley "The Spread of Development through Colonial European Settlement"

11:30am-12:30pm: Emmanuel Akyeampong, Professor of History, Harvard and Yaw Nyarko, Professor of Economics, NYU
"How Indigenous Entrepreneurs Brought Cocoa and Transformed Ghana" 

12:30pm-1:30pm: Lunch

1:30pm-2:30pm: Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics, NYU Wagner,  Keynote Speech, "How Microcredit Went Global"

2:30pm-3:30pm: Steven Pennings, NYU, "Do National Leaders Matter?

--

The human race has made progress towards the good life as long as thought and economic activity were left free to cross national boundaries and creeds... But now, we face a new and more formidable superstition than the world has ever known, the myth of the nation-state, whose priests are as intolerant as those of the Inquisition. The struggle for the rights of the individual against the all-powerful and intolerant nation-state is the most difficult and crucial issue of our generation.
- Economist John Condliffe, 1938

Conference funding is generously provided by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.